Salad days

Zora in LA writes in defence of the indefensible (ie green peppers, the scourge of AMT297):

Green peppers aren’t totally worthless. In many cuisines, they’re used in cooking. Creole cooking is the main example. The bitter pepper adds a note of pleasant sharpness when contrasted with sweeter cooked vegetables. It’s also excellent on pizza, as it provides the same contrast.

And, working in a supermarket as I do, I can confirm that they are indeed cheaper.

But eating them raw? Only sickos do that.

Well, now I’m torn, Zora – I hate green peppers, but I love Creole food. Let me wrestle with my feelings while we contemplate this email from Simon in Germany:

Your recent conversation on Pizza Hut reminded me of something I once saw in a Pizza Hut in China. There they seem to have a “only one visit to the salad bar” policy. So this led to some ingenious solutions as to how to beat the system.

As you can see from the photo attached, the basic idea is to use the more solid and brick-like pieces of salad to build a wall around the lip of the bowl – luckily in China there is a large supply of cubed water melon – and then to fill in the middle using the less structurally sound greenery.

One I saw was about twice the height of that pictured, took 45 minutes to make, and a further another 45 minutes to carry back to the table as any jolt or shake would have brought down their towering shaft of salad.

P.S Surely if you owned a Pizza Hut in China you would have melon balls rather than cubes!

I’m impressed people manage to build such structures on the rim of a small salad bowl. Readers, do share your buffet-cheating tactics and triumphs in the comments.

2 Responses to “Salad days”

i picked tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of bell peppers on the farm in my teenage years, and i can tell you that a green pepper is not simply an immature red pepper. perhaps this is the case in heirloom varieties or the mediocre varieties sold in garden stores, but almost every green pepper that you will ever buy comes from a plant cultivated to yield only green peppers (though occasionally a green pepper may have a small patch of red or of tan “sunburn” if left to grow long enough); if you leave that green pepper on the plant, it’ll probably rot sooner than it’ll turn red. the same goes for red peppers; an immature red pepper would be unsatisfying if picked while still green.

Snobs are not missing out on eating at the Harvester, because the service and quality of food is especially shit. Just try the “The Bells of Ouzeley” by the River Thames. I was passed by for service by people just turning up at the bar loudly proclaiming “they were there first” and the food made two of us ill.